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Irony is still alive

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that psychological studies on “priming” may have overstated the effects. It sounds plausible that thinking about words associated with old age might make someone walk slower afterwards for example, but as has been shown for many effects like this, they are nearly impossible to replicate.

Now Ulrich Schimmack, Moritz Heene, and Kamini Kesavan have dug a bit deeper into this, in a post at Replicability-Index titled “Reconstruction of a Train Wreck: How Priming Research Went off the Rails”. They analysed all studies cited in Chapter 4 of Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow”. I’m also a big fan of the book, so this was interesting to read.

I’d recommend everyone with even a passing interest on these things to go and read the whole fascinating post. I’ll just note the authors’ conclusion: “…priming research is a train wreck and readers […] should not consider the presented studies as scientific evidence that subtle cues in their environment can have strong effects on their behavior outside their awareness.”

The irony is pointed out by Kahneman himself in his response: “there is a special irony in my mistake because the first paper that Amos Tversky and I published was about the belief in the “law of small numbers,” which allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples.”